The Guardian view on Europe’s refugee crisis: a little leadership, at last

Angela Merkel has faced up to how a humanitarian emergency is threatening a continent’s defining values. The rest of Europe should pay attention, and follow suit

‘Mrs Merkel has sent a timely signal that the lowest instincts must now be confronted. She has reminded Europe that it was built on values.’ Photograph: Reiner Zensen/Imago/Barcroft Media

Visionary language is rarely heard from pro-Europeans these days; attempts to cast the EU as a morally based endeavour risk ridicule and scorn. The brave stance that Angela Merkel, not an easy woman to mock, has taken on the refugee and migrant crisis thus deserves close attention. The German chancellor has taken the lead on an issue that has, for too long, produced nothing but squabbling among member states, and fodder for the populists who would wall their countries off from the outside world.

Hundreds of thousands are fleeing war zones and persecution in Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the second world war. The situation is not likely to change any time soon, and so it is welcome that someone with clout is taking the high ground, instead of pandering to demagoguery. Mrs Merkel has put it bluntly: “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed.” Days after European opinion was shaken by the discovery of 71 decomposing bodies of migrants inside a truck on an Austrian highway, the chancellor is sending out a strong message. Mrs Merkel had already taken a unique initiative in announcing that all Syrian refugees would be eligible to claim asylum in Germany – unilaterally, and rightly, waiving the so-called Dublin procedures, under which displaced people must claim asylum in the first EU state that they arrive in.

Could this be a turning point? Throughout Europe, there is a growing realisation that nations need to act together – not “talk at each other”, as Mrs Merkel puts it – in the face of an ongoing tragedy that has claimed 2,500 lives during 2015. But a new impulse to help jostles with resurgent xenophobia and indifference towards those in need of protection: witness the outrageous noises coming from some capitals about admitting only Christian, and not Muslim, refugees. Witness also the fences erected, in Hungary and elsewhere, to try to stem the flow of the desperate. Some of Europe’s oldest democracies are content to trample on basic notions of solidarity, by rejecting all talk of fair sharing of asylum seekers. Britain’s record remains particularly dismal, the government having announced that only 1,000 Syrians would be granted asylum. It was heartening to hear Yvette Cooper argue, in explicitly moral terms, for a tenfold increase in that figure on Tuesday.

The point isn’t that Europe should take on all the misery of the world – framing the debate that way fans the fearmongering that needs to be defeated. The task at hand is to manage, practically and humanely, a crisis of unprecedented dimensions. Drawing up a common European asylum policy is urgent, and so is finding the resources to back it up. Just as important, legal channels must be created for refugees to claim asylum without undergoing deadly voyages across the sea or hidden in trucks. The longer-term solutions are about anti-trafficking cooperation and development policies for Africa, the Balkans and other places where dire economic circumstances persuade young people that the only way to a better life is to emigrate.

EU summits in the coming weeks must grapple with all this detail. But Mrs Merkel has sent a timely signal that the lowest instincts must now be confronted. She has reminded Europe that it was built on values, including the imperative of “never again”, which flows directly from 1930s memories of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria being shunned by other nations. Some will see other special reasons why Germany is proving more willing than others to open up to refugees, such as a rapidly ageing population, which strengthens the economic benefits of inward migration. But don’t dismiss Mrs Merkel’s indisputable point, which is that Europe must come together on a strategic issue that cannot be wished away.

More such language is needed, more vision and more bravery, from other leaders – not shallow slogans of rejection, which solve nothing and deliver only collective shame.